Friday, 29 August 2014

How to relieve anxiety in times of adversity

The main difference
between individuals who become desperate and those still keep trying
despite countless disappointments is that the latter are able to
imagine a positive outcome at the end of their story. When you see
people turn completely pessimistic, abandon their dreams, and
conclude that there is no future for them, you are witnessing people
who cannot conceive of a solution to their problems.

Yet, it is easy to fall
into this kind of situation if you don't keep a rational perspective
of life. Unless you make the effort to maintain a healthy optimism,
there is no way that you can solve your problems. Unfortunately, it
happens all too often that people who are severely sick, or who are
experiencing financial difficulties, lose their self-confidence, and
suffer a nervous breakdown. In this way, they are closing the door to
the opportunities for improvement. They are depriving themselves of
any possibility of emerging as winners on the other side of the
tunnel.

The main difficulty in
remaining optimistic in times of adversity is that you cannot get
yourself to believe that things are going to turn out right unless
you make the effort to compare your situation with a similar one that
has also turned out right, so that you can draw the conclusion that
you still have a chance. Unless you can see that someone else has
overcome similar problems, it is extremely difficult to convince
yourself that you can still win.

The crucial ability that you are going to need

The ability to imagine a
positive outcome is crucial for maintaining an optimistic attitude,
which is one of the key factors for overcoming severe problems. If
you allow yourself to fall into a spiral of negative thoughts, you
will find it much more difficult to solve your problems. Thus it is
imperative that you make the effort to maintain a balanced view of
the events. You have to force yourself to look at the situation in an
objective manner, so that you can increase your chances of solving
your problems.

Whenever I have to speak
about how to acquire this crucial ability, I always tell the story of
Joseph Abbeel. It is a fascinating story from the 19th
century, showing how a man can survive, and still have a good life
despite massive problems, terrible reversals, and endless calamities.
When people get depressed by looking at their own situation, I always
ask them to compare their chances with those of Joseph Abbeel.

Abbeel lived in the
period between 1786 to 1866. As far as we can conclude from existing
records, he had a quick mind despite his meagre education. His mental
agility is shown by the fact that, although he had only learned the
basics of Latin and French at school (together with his Flemish
mother tongue), he later picked up German, Polish, and Russian during
his travels. He was also unique in that he wrote his memoirs in 1817,
giving posterity a fascinating insight into that period of European
history.

When Abbeel turned 20
years old, he was forced to leave his job at this father's beer
brewery, and enlist in the French army. At the time, the French
emperor Napoleon Bonaparte was engaged in wars all around Europe, and
often resorted to recruiting foreign soldiers for his military
campaigns.

Amongst other military
campaigns, Abbeel was sent to fight in Austria and Germany several
times, and had to serve as a soldier in the French army for ten
years, without actually accumulating any money. When Napoleon lost
his empire, thousands of soldiers remained unpaid. Abbeel not only
did not draw any financial benefits from the war, but had to suffer
all kinds of injuries during his ten years as a solider.

The worst part of
Abbeel's experience was his participation in the Napoleonic invasion
of Russia in 1812, which turned out to be a complete disaster,
resulting in the death of 76% of all the soldiers that had
accompanied Napoleon.

In addition, Abbeel was
taken prisoner after the war, while he was retreating through
Germany. The Russians forced him, together with another 6000
prisoners, to walk back from Hamburg to Moscow, and then from Moscow
to Kazan, where he was imprisoned in horrible conditions for almost
three years. From the 6000 war prisoners that were taken to Kazan,
only 170 survived.

To give you an idea of
the extreme situations that Abbeel had to face, I have extracted
these facts from the memoirs he wrote in 1817:

His horse was shot
down.

Abbeel was then shot
in the arm.

Then he became
deadly sick with typhus.

He fell into a sort
of comma, and the military surgeon declared him dead, giving orders
for his burial. Fortunately, Abbeel woke up by the time he was going
to be buried alive.

He went repeatedly
through near-starvation conditions, sometimes having to go without
food for two weeks.

He took part in
battles were so many people died, and where the reigning chaos made
it impossible to move for days, so that Abbeel had to spent several
nights sleeping amongst the corpses of fellow soldiers.

When Napoleon
ordered the retreat from Moscow, Abbeel had to walk two hundred
kilometres on land covered by half a meter of snow.

The difference between
many of those who died and Abbeel is that he never gave up. When he
was taken prisoner by the Russians, he escaped three times. When he
was starving, he still found ways to procure food, whether it was by
eating horse meat or horse blood, or by mixing flour with water to
make dough, which he ate uncooked.

He never gave up his will to survive

Abbeel never gave up his
will to survive even in the most terrible circumstances. If you take
into account the number of soldiers that were taken prisoners,
Abbeel's chances of survival were only 2.8%, which is an extremely
low figure, much lower than the survival chances of most people who
are diagnosed with cancer nowadays.

After Abbeel was
eventually released from his imprisonment in 1815, he had to return
to Belgium by walking all the way through Russia, Lithuania, Poland,
and Germany, with no money in his pockets. Upon his arrival in
Belgium, he did not despair, and refrained from complaining about his
penuries. He was then 29 years old, and had no savings, and no
profession. He had just wasted ten years of his life by fighting wars
for which he did not care at all.

Abbeel managed to survive
against incredible odds in terrible situations. There are no many
situations in life where someone's chances of survival are only 2.8%.
Frankly, I don't know personally anybody in such a situation. Even
the impoverished people often reported by newspapers and television
are seldom in situations as terrible as that of Joseph Abbeel.

The reason why Abbeel
managed to survive is because he was a always able to picture a
positive outcome to his story. He never gave up, and he never
despaired. When he wrote his memoirs in 1817, he recalled many
critical situations with humour and satire. His memoirs do not tell
the story of a bitter man wronged by the world, but the story of a
man who has learned from experience that you can still survive when
everything turns against you, provided that you continue to look for
opportunities, and make the best of what is available.

After Abbeel returned to
Belgium, he managed to rebuild his life. He did not go back to his
original profession of beer brewer, but found a clerical job in
Kaster, a small municipality. Ten years later, he became a
house-master in a primary school, and during his last years, he
worked as a municipal tax collector. Abbeel died at the ripe age of
80 years, decades later than the great majority of soldiers that had
taken part in the Napoleonic wars.

Is your situation as
hopeless as that of Joseph Abbeel? Are you facing threats that are so
severe that make it impossible to imagine a positive outcome? Are you
assailed by problems so terrible that prevent you from conceiving the
idea of winning?

I very much doubt it. I
have already seen too many individuals give up their dreams for no
good reason. I have already seen too many people fall prey to the
negative messages of the media, their family, and their friends. Do
not fall into this trap.

You have to make the
effort to remain objective and rational despite your problems. You
have to force you to figure out a way in which you can still come out
a winner. You have to compare your chances of solving your problems
with the 2.8% survival chances of Joseph Abbeel.

It is only by imagining a
positive outcome of your situation that you can start to turn things
round, but beware that nobody can conduct this thinking process for
you. You have to stay awake and alert, thinking about your options.
You have to keep looking for new ideas and new knowledge, so that you
never fall prey to despair.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JOHN VESPASIAN is the author of eight books about rational living, including "When Everything Fails, Try This" (2009), "Rationality Is the Way to Happiness" (2009), "The Philosophy of Builders: How to Build a Great Future with the Pieces from Your Past" (2010), "The 10 Principles of Rational Living" (2012), "Rational Living, Rational Working: How to Make Winning Moves When Things Are Falling Apart" (2013), "Consistency: The Key to Permanent Stress Relief" (2014), "On Becoming Unbreakable: How Normal People Become Extraordinarily Self-Confident" (2015), and "Thriving in difficult times: Twelve lessons from Ancient Greece to improve your life today" (2016).